SWL Week in Review - Capitalist Multiverse

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

6/15/2026, 8:56 PM

MORE OR LESS - The Stories We Buy (and Sell).
Given the headlines of last week…. The story was about story. SpaceX has one… the S1 full of TAM and pictures was a success — people want to buy the ‘future’ / techno-optimism (and a bit of 140 characters along with them flying cars)… Anthropic has fully swiped the story of ‘AI so good it is dangerous’… but where does this leave OpenAI (the original AI-danger story, that softened itself for popular consumption … is the answer ‘SIZE MATTERS’… ? Remember when it was ‘making the world more open and connected’ (that was a banger btw.)

THE REAL SPACEX IPO LESSON: WE LIVE IN A CAPITALIST MULTIVERSE OF VALUE

DCF is no longer the only globally scalable story of value. The internet lets minority belief systems create trillion-dollar markets

For the last few decades, the dominant global story of value has been the DCF.

Things are worth the present value of future cash flows. Revenue becomes margin. Margin becomes profit. Profit becomes dividends or buybacks. That is the cleanest, most liquid, most institutionally acceptable story of capitalism. It is still the reserve currency of valuation because the buyer base for that story is almost infinitely deep.

But it is not the only story of value.

The real lesson of the SpaceX IPO is that alternative stories of value can now scale to previously impossible size.

Not just GME scale. Not just crypto scale. Trillion-dollar public-market scale.

The single mass-market story of value is dying the same way mass media died. There is no longer one narrative everyone has to accept. There are capital subcultures, belief networks, and cults of value that can coordinate through the internet, pool conviction, and support enormous valuations around stories that do not reduce neatly to near-term cash flow.

SpaceX is the cleanest version of this yet because there is a futuristic picture to believe in (in fact they put several of those pictures in their S1, leterally, and hilariously)... Inclusive of a $23T TAM which was so ridiculous that it was brilliant brilliant marketing.

And in a world where outcomes feel distributed between zero and infinity, many investors are no longer trying to “beat the market.” They are trying not to miss the swerve... especially with retail fears of the permanent underclass.

That all matters.

People’s love of the old capitalist story is low. They do not feel ownership through dividends. Taxes mean they rarely experience profits directly. “Good assets at reasonable prices” feel psychologically insufficient when the real fear is missing the one thing that bends the curve between normal life and utopia.

So yes, if we are going to make someone a trillionaire, people like the aesthetics of it being the rocket guy. I certainly do.

But the deeper lesson is this: you no longer need to convince everyone. You need a large enough and growing core of people who love the story, want to own the story, and believe the story might swerve to infinity...

Bitcoin taught this lesson first. Most well-adjusted smart people said, “No profits, no value,” and missed that internet-native belief itself could become a capital formation mechanism. GME was another scoffing moment. SpaceX is the latest — and maybe the most important — because it feels like the anti-cult narrative is capitulating.

People are starting to accept that mono-line capitalism, with one universally accepted story of value, is over.

Will this end well? Who knows. History says probably not. But the post-internet world is genuinely different from the pre-internet world. Inequality, high taxes, fractionalization, regionalization, de-globalization, and internet coordination all point in the same direction: not all capital is playing the same game anymore.

Fukuyama was famously wrong about the “end of history” if that meant convergence on liberal democracy, global markets, and 1990s capitalism as the final operating system.

But maybe we are reaching the end of modern capitalist history in a different sense.

The age of one liquid, universal, DCF-based story of value is ending.

The next era is a capitalist multiverse: people holding assets not only for cash flows, but for identity, story, optionality, sovereignty, and the chance — however irrational it may look from the outside — of participating in the swerve to infinity.

.... Or we will look back in a few years and this email will look even dumber than what Francis said in the 1990s - Time will tell!

OTHER HOT TAKES OF LAST WEEK

The Nobel Prize in Economics for Mat-Mul Resource Allocation — what should you spend on tokens for what type of problem — when you start considering the relative cost of answering a question vs. validating its answer, the cost of rightness / wrongness in different situations… the value of incremental ‘rightness’ / whether it asymptotes out or grows over time… the adversarial nature of certain types of knowledge, etc. We are facing an amazing set of really interesting economics problems around AI… and no one has really good answers. I do really look forward to the Nobel prizes to come here / and all the great fundamental economics thinking and work that will have to be done to answer the question of what to spend to ‘know’ something… now that you can in some form formally have that conversation (vs doing it on feel) — until we have answers tho, the lack of precision on this IS the margin of premium token dealers like OpenAI and Anthropic… and our inability to properly price all this IS their margin (just like the old days of high margin ads, where you were waiting half your money… it was just unclear which half!)

The End of Billionaire Power in The Era of Trillions — lots has been written this week trying to contextualize (or at least grab clicks) about what it means to have a ‘trillionaire’ from every angle… here is what I think does matter… It just isn’t very meaningful or powerful to be a mere billionaire anymore. To be clear, you are rich… but for so long the narrative has been ‘these billionaires are running things’— well in the era when someone is 1000x richer, no they aren’t. Don’t even get me started on the mere centi-millionaires…. Elon’s 1T is the equivalent of 10,000 of those (which liquid wise is what chat GPT thinks is the whole US population of em!) — The real story now is that beyond simply being ‘rich’ and free… if you really want to be ‘in the game’ you need many tens of billions…. And even then, to pony up $100B to do something really important, you can either get everyone you know of the 0.01% fully committed (herding cats), or just catch Elon on a Tuesday when he is feeling frisky. That is the real difference — and it does matter, because the people who thought they were players in the 1990s and 2000s just aren’t anymore. That is the real moment here / the real rotation…. And you can’t unsee that those 1990s and 2000s ‘mere billionaires’ were pretty left leaning… the deca-trillionare class… no so much.

Superlatives Rule - Be First, Biggest, Best - I really thought this was very smart by Tim Higgins in the WSJ. Superlatives … biggest, best, first are deeply American and the type of branding that really sings (especially in our era where nuance doesn’t travel) — It isn’t just ‘what is the BFD (big f-ing idea)… it is beyond that — don’t go out unless you are after one of those three things… it just isn’t worth it (and no one will show up to help or care anyway)

Why all the Ivies agree on SATs (except Columbia) — I keep forgetting to share this but it is quite good (from 1636)

Idiocracy… is a truly great movie. And I don’t mean this politically, I just mean it aesthetically — it is quite fun to watch life imitate art so so faithfully.

I can be a bot, or human, or both — this is just some silly programming, but funny to see it in forms — tricking bots to ‘self disclose’? … allowing me to be both a bot and a human? This is some trans-humanist special sauce forms right here.

MeritFrist VC Interview — this is cool from the MF team… as a new form of interview based on AI and chat… it is also surprisingly hard / requires deep thought … good luck!

Kicks Game 4 (and 5, and 3) — When I was a kid my dad used to always insist on leaving games early to beat the crowds … there was one time I begged and we didn’t, and it ended up being an unlikely come from behind victory… I said ‘see dad this is why you stay’… to which he retorted ‘and we did for the right one’ — I can’t help but wonder if my dad would have left this one at the end of the 3rd quarter — I don’t really care about the Knicks … but my god do I love proving you can consistently pull it out of nowhere in a 4th quarter from being down. That is the best America 250 story you could tell.

Best,
Sam

P.S. “One does not book through Opentable”

P.P.S. The best of instagram basketball, soccer, kids, Tswift, SpaceX… and this will probably lose me a few subscribers.

Similar newsletters

There are other similar shared emails that you might be interested in: